Shitty journalism

Sexual harassment is a serious issue. It deserves to be taken seriously. It deserves better than to be exploited for the kind of cheap sensationalism we see in this article.

Sexual harassment of women at the Scottish Parliament is a “ticking time bomb”, says top lawyer Aamer Anwar. Except he didn’t say that at all. Those were not his words. This is the breathless rhetoric of a self-styled ‘Investigations Editor’ as he struggles to spin a drama out of thin air; desperately hoping to piggy-back on the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

And then there’s the knee-jerk defensiveness of the British establishment responding to allegations of misbehaviour at Westminster by trying to tar Holyrood with the same brush. A shabby exercise in preemptive whitabootery.

I don’t think anybody has ever claimed Holyrood is “immune” from sexual harassment. In fact, it would be rather surprising if it was. But what has Paul Hutcheon’s ‘investigation’ uncovered? Where is the substance? There is nothing here but rumour, hearsay and salacious speculation.

The headline might just as well have read, “Sexual harassment of women at the Sunday Herald is a “ticking time bomb”, says random guy we phoned at half past four this morning.” There is precisely the same amount of actual evidence to support such a claim.

Shitty journalism!

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8 thoughts on “Shitty journalism”

Hats off to you Peter and thanks for bringing this to our attention. I’m probably a utopianist and I like to think that one day we’ll look back at today’s media in utter astonishment. Sadly, I wouldn’t imagine it will be in my life time!

Hmmm, I would be more convinced if Hutcheon’s lazy nod-and-wink bandwagon-climbing were rather more specific as to individual transgressors/transgressions, but that would take real investigation and a dash of courage, none of which are markedly visible in present-day Scottish so-called journalism.

Besides, in what sense could this possibly spell the supposed imminent doom of Holyrood, as the wild headline implies?

Even in the days when I read the Herald, I always treated Hutcheon’s pieces with extreme caution.

It started when I read a hatchet job on the NHS (a subject that I know quite a lot about). The piece was sensationalist nonsense. I know very well the imperfections of the NHS but his piece was extremely outlandish.

We asked Amar Sanwar if it was “a ticking time bomb” and he fell about laughing at our clumsy use of of very overused journalistic cliche.
In any of these rubbish articles, as soon as I read “The xxx can reveal”, I switch off and bin it.